


Alive

by grayimperia



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Blood, Gen, Introspection, Pre-Canon, Self-Hatred, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-17
Updated: 2017-03-17
Packaged: 2018-10-06 11:14:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10333400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayimperia/pseuds/grayimperia
Summary: [Major NDRV3 Spoilers]Gonna make a heartthrob out of me, just a bit of minor surgerySaihara wants to be special.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Major NDRV3 endgame spoilers

In the game, Saihara stares at himself in the mirror and sees someone weak that he’d like to change.

Before the game, Saihara stares at himself in the mirror and sees someone so horrifically normal that he barely feels alive. 

-

The boy sitting next to him sounds like he’s about to hack up a lung. Even with the bulkiest set of headphones he owns clamped over his ears, he can still hear cough after cough echoing off the train walls. 

This seems to be a common occurrence for the boy, as Saihara spies him taking out one of many napkins stuffed haphazardly into his bag for a round of coughing into that rather than his hands. He pulls it away from his face and says, “Fucking hell…” when he spies little spots of blood standing bright against the white fabric. 

Saihara turns up the volume on his phone and tries to focus. The live finals of DanganRonpa are always exciting, but the actual ‘live’ factor makes it difficult to watch at all times of day. Maybe he should have gone through with his plan to fake sick today. Or if his uncle saw through that, he could always attempt to guilt trip him about how he’d be taking away the one thing he loved. But Saihara had done that for the past three years, and his uncle was starting to become dulled to his fake tears and sob stories about how he hated his life. Hating life wasn’t special—everyone he knew hated their lives. 

Thanks to an unexpected suicide after the fourth murder, the show will end on the seventh trial. A few seasons had made it to that many, though none had the beat the record of the season with no less than ten class trials. Though the trivia was amusing, Saihara overall thought that season was lackluster since the producers screwed up and gave “no will to live” as a character trait out like candy. 

Watching people die wasn’t fun if they all just lied down and accepted it.

They’re still investigating the school for clues to the mastermind’s lair. The Ultimate Gardener—the protagonist of this season—finds an odd strand of hair in the secret room he and the Ultimate Adventurer just discovered. Saihara smiles. Looks like he guessed the mastermind right again. 

He’s listening to them prattle on about what it means to doubt their friends when he feels someone nudging his shoulder with increasing roughness. Saihara ignores them.

The Ultimate Adventurer is making the logical argument that the mastermind is not their friend, and then someone actually pulls one of his headphones off of his ear. 

Saihara snaps his head to see the coughing boy with his offending hand still outstretched towards him, completely unapologetic. He gestures towards Saihara’s phone. “I said, is that the season finale?”

Saihara moves as far away as he can from the boy without falling onto the floor. The other boy follows unabashedly, seemingly undisturbed by Saihara’s obvious attempts to get away from him. He’s practically hovering over him, and they have to look absolutely ridiculous perched at the far end of the long row of seats. 

He can feel a cold sweat breaking out over his face, and his eyes dart to the ground when he mumbles, “Yeah…”

The other boy smiles widely. “What’s happening?” He reaches out and grabs the other side of Saihara’s phone, pulling it between them to get a better look. 

Saihara immediately slaps at his hand. That startles the other boy, and he glares at Saihara like he’s the one flouting all social graces. “What’s your problem?” 

“You’re trying to steal my phone,” Saihara says, trying his best to sound authoritative as he takes in just how much larger the other boy is. 

He waves his hand. “No, I just want to see.” He leans his head in close. Saihara feels his face warming, and he pulls his hat down lower over his eyes. The other boy says, “What are they talking about?” and he’s so close that his breath pushes itself against Saihara’s skin, creeping along his neck. He fidgets awkwardly in his efforts to suppress a shiver. 

“They’re… just talking about who they think the mastermind is…” 

“Oh, it’s him, right?” He jabs a finger at the Ultimate Adventurer. 

Saihara frowns. “No.”

The boy looks at him in surprise. “They’ve already revealed it?”

He shakes his head. “No, but… it’s not him. That wouldn’t make any sense.”

The boy squints at the screen, taking a long, silent look. Then he says, “…you’re sure?”

Saihara grabs his phone out of his hands. “Yes, I’m sure!”

People turn to stare at him. Sweat drips down the back of his neck, and his face is burning, and he pulls his hat down as far as it can go. 

The other boy just laughs. “Whatever. I’ve never liked the whole fucking ‘figure out who did it’ thing.”

Saihara begins to wipe his phone’s screen off with the side of his sleeve. “Then why do you watch the show?” He mutters darkly under his breath. “That’s the whole point.”

Somehow, the other boy hears him. “It’s not the whole point. The point is the murders, and those are always really fucking cool. Hey,” he pats him on the shoulder, and Saihara really wants him to stop touching him. “Did I mention that I’m auditioning for the next season?”

Saihara furrows his brow. “You just said you don’t like the trials.” 

“Oh, I’m not going to fucking bother with that part—I’m gonna kill someone.”

Saihara scans him up and down. Well, he thinks, the games always do need canon fodder for the first few cases. 

For some reason—likely, saying a word in defense of the sanctity of the show—Saihara feels compelled to say, “I’m going to audition, too.”

He snorts. “You?”

“Yes, me,” he snaps. “Is that a problem?”

“Nah, man, it’s just,” he gestures towards him, “look at you. You’re total kill bait. You’ve got first victim practically fucking written all over you.” 

Saihara has never felt so insulted in his life. He puts his phone down for the first time since the boy approached him. “I wouldn’t be a victim. I’d…” he thinks, I’d be the detective who kills someone, I’ve thought about this, I’ve dreamed about this _for so long_ , I’ll be like all the other detectives they’ve had but smarter and cooler and

“You’d what?” 

Saihara hunches his shoulders, physically turning his body away from him. His face is burning. “I wouldn’t be the first victim.” 

The other boy looks like he’s about to respond when his whole body stutters. Saihara glances at him and sees he’s launched into another coughing fit. Saihara thinks, serves him right. 

-

Saihara looks at himself in the mirror in a bathroom in his school. 

His face is pretty like a girl’s. That perhaps would have been a source of insecurity in a different time, but feminine looking boys like him were supposedly all the rage now a days. He knows pretty faces are in demand, and DanganRonpa keeps churning out contestants with slighter shoulders, longer lashes, and cuter personalities. 

Saihara knows he’s attractive. It isn’t a matter of self-confidence or opinion, but simply fact. He’s never received a love confession or been on a date, but that just tells him that there’s something wrong with him and it isn’t the way he looks. Because he looks like the boys in pictures plastered on magazines and boy-band posters that girls coo over in hundreds. No, his face isn’t the problem. 

The problem, he thinks, is that he is normal. He is too painfully, agonizingly normal to ever be worth anyone’s attention. Saihara has fewer friends than he can count on one finger and parents in a foreign country and an uncle who works all day and reads the paper all night. But that’s okay. He isn’t interested in anybody who would want to pay attention to a nobody like him.

Saihara splashes his face with water. The person he’s had the longest conversation with in months was the coughing boy on the train. He still feels his breath on his neck.

His reflection stares back at him when he blinks his eyes open. He looks at his own pretty face, dripping with tap water. 

The people who look like him who get attention are the ones with talent. The ones who are just naturally the best and naturally get to live exciting lives and naturally don’t hate every part of themselves. 

But it isn’t all about being natural. The untalented, manufactured for entertainment into perfect beings exist, too—the ones who cross their fingers and are lucky enough to get picked to have people play with their brains until they’re just as special as those who didn’t have to destroy their entire selves to be talented. Saihara wants to be one of those. 

He’s not special, and it’s not his face that’s the problem.

DanganRonpa likes to make cute boys and then torture them to make girls cry. But Saihara doesn’t want to make the audience cry. He wants to scare them. Among the special, he wants to be significant. He wants to be the pretty, cool boy who commits murder and gets executed in a way that people remember. 

Dying as someone special is so, so much better than living as someone normal.

Saihara’s never particularly rooted for the pretty boys, but if his face helps him get on the show, he really doesn’t give a damn. 

-

He watches the finale that night, locked in his room with the lights off so his uncle doesn’t bother him with things like needing sleep. The whites of his eyes have started to grow red, and his face is bathed in light as the three remaining students choose hope to send the mastermind to their death.

The Ultimate Adventurer—this season’s pretty boy—is chosen to be sacrificed for that hope. In exchange, the Ultimate Gardener and the Ultimate Lion Tamer get to go free. Saihara absently thinks that it’s a shame the lion tamer never killed anyone.

The two survivors begin to launch it to speeches about the importance of never giving up and how they’ll never forget their dead friends. Saihara stifles a laugh as the camera cuts to the adventurer, the soon to be dead friend they’re forgetting right now. There’s a weariness in the boy’s face, and he’s staring into some place far, far away when the camera pans out of the cage to show him being left behind. 

Saihara doesn’t understand why he’s so distraught over getting to participate again. Returning contestants get to be new, exciting people in new, exciting situations over and over again. The Ultimate Adventure looks dead-eyed in to the camera as the shows closes on his fourth time as a sacrifice. He’s just beaten the record. He’s got to spend so much of his life in the killing game. Saihara crosses his arms as he feels jealousy bubbles up inside him. No, he feels resentment. How can someone look so dead when they get to be more alive than he’s felt in his entire boring existence? 

As the screen fades to black, an ad pops up for auditions to be on the fifty-third season. Saihara bites his lip. 

He’s going to do it. He’s going to kill someone. 

He’s going to get to feel alive. 

-

The auditions aren’t for a few more weeks, and Saihara has to suffer through the rest of his life until then.

One morning before school, he looks in the mirror. 

His reflection stares back, and he feels almost giddy at the idea of every part of himself being stripped away. 

It’ll just be his pretty face, a new personality, and himself, nervous as a groom on his wedding day waiting for his execution to walk down the aisle.

-

The coughing boy is on the same train as him again on the morning he’s going to audition. 

He isn’t coughing this time, and he takes a seat next to Saihara, casually sprawling his long limbs out over the bench. One of his arms has taken up residence on top of the row of seats, his hand stretching all the way out to above Saihara’s shoulder on the other side. 

The boy isn’t breathing on his neck this time, but the invasion of space is still enough to make Saihara hunch his shoulders in on himself. 

They sit like that in silence. Saihara leaning forward, clutching his schoolbag to his chest, and this strange boy nonchalant and uncaring about nearly putting his arm around him.

The boy clears his throat, and Saihara braces himself to be at ground-zero for the blood spray that’ll accompany the imminent coughing fit. Instead, the boy begins trying to make conversation with him. “So, uh, you’re in high school, right?” 

Saihara looks at his school uniform and school bag and the other school students filling the train car. He’s about to mouth off about how he possibly figured that out when he remembers how much larger the boy currently looming over him is. He mumbles, “Yeah.”

“Well, have you ever heard of DanganRonpa?” he smiles. “I think they’re auditioning right now. You should try out.”

Saihara snorts. “That’s not what you said to me last time.”

“Huh?” a look of absolute confusion passes over the boy’s face. “What are you talking about?”

He knows he’s already blushing—in embarrassment? in anger? in the weird memory of the boy literally breathing down his neck?—when he says, “we’ve talked before.”

The boy scratches the back of his head with his hand not hovering above Saihara’s shoulder. “I’m drawing a blank, man. Sure it was me?”

Saihara frowns. “I was watching the finale of DanganRonpa season fifty-two, and you tried to steal my phone.”

He can see the gears slowly turning in the coughing boy’s mind. Saihara tugs his hat lower over his rubicund face as the boy lets out a loud, “Ohhhhhh.” He laughs. “That was you?”

Saihara snaps, “Yes, it was me,” before he can stop himself. The back of his shirt collar is sticking to his neck with sweat. 

He laughs in Saihara’s face again. “Sorry, man, guess I forgot.” He waves his hand vaguely. “You just have one of those faces, I guess.”

“What does that mean?” he’s clenching his fists. Saihara remembers the boy calling him kill bait and how he had never felt so insulted. He thinks that the boy’s about to one-up himself. 

He shrugs. “Dunno. I guess you’re just—” he suddenly stops, and his whole body jerks forward. His hand painfully grips on to Saihara's shoulder for support. Then he’s coughing, and blood splatters on to Saihara’s face. 

The boy can’t stop coughing, and Saihara blinks as he feels another person’s blood drip down his pretty face.

-

Saihara’s face is warm and his palms are sweating. 

He looks up into the camera, and sees his reflection in its lense stare down at him. 

He smiles and feels more alive than he has in years as he tells his reflection exactly how he wants to change everything about himself.

He feels so alive when he talks about how all he wants is to die on T.V.

**Author's Note:**

> The summary is from the song 'Desperate Measures' by Marianas Trench. This fic is basically just my headcanons for pre-game Saihara and a little bit of Momota because I didn't want to have him just talk to himself for the entire thing... and also because I love Momota.


End file.
